Wednesday

+ A little advice for Google: stay away from AOL. Yuck. What good could this possibly do?

+ Here's a picture of the cat who ate the canary:



Ooh! Cool! New! Sparkly! Want...

Wait. I hardly watch tv. When would I ever watch it on an iPod? Best thing this can do for me? Bring the price of a normal iPod or nano down (including via eBay).

The video iPod has DRM of course. Gross.

Part of the launch includes ABC video (famously, Desperate Housewives. yawn). ABC is owned by Disney. There's a picture in the article of Steve shaking hands with Robert. Does that mean we can have Disney distribute Pixar again? Can Pixar please do the Incredibles sequel?

+ Google's opening up a new site in Phoenix. Too bad that's a little too hot for me... ;-)

+ To watch this development read on Lifehacker:

Morning news roundup: A Marriage of Bookshelf and Phone [NYT]. "Last week, intellectually inclined commuters, exercisers and people sitting around for jury duty gained an ingenious new audio alternative: books on phone."

+ Tom, outraged (and I agree):

Our laws say the only food aid we can send overseas is stuff grown by our farmers and shipped by our shippers and-apparently-sold often on the side by our relief agencies to self-finance their own anti-poverty programs. Nice huh? CARE and Catholic Relief Services and five other biggies will take food designated for people in Africa and sell it in markets there to raise money for their programs in the region. Talk about starving Peter to finance Paul!

Well, Congress tried to change this stupid law, which basically results in 50% of our food aid disappearing in admin and transportation costs, but the Iron Triangle of food businesses, shippers and relief orgs successfully blocked the legislative change, despite firm White House support. The reform act was supposed to allow U.S. Agency for International Development to buy food locally for starving populations, thus simultaneously improving local agriculture conditions. Sounds pretty sensible given that poor local ag conditions is what gets your starvation in the first place.

+ Brazil (appropriately threatens to break AIDS drug patents, then makes a deal to but for half. Strong work.

+ I'm really angry these days at the Iraqi Sunnis who are making it so hard to move forward.

Tell me the Shiites and Kurds aren't bending over backwards to make this constitution work for the Sunnis, who largely sat out its drafting but are now being offered a special panel in the first Parliament to revise the constitution--basically a mini-constitutional congress just for Sunnis, or a make-over, politically speaking.

In that same post, Tom's also got a good quote from the other Tom (Friedman)

Inexplicably to me, the Bush team, which has finally settled on the right rationale for the war in Iraq--to help Arabs carve out a space in the heart of their world where they can create a decent, progressive future, instead of drifting aimlessly under autocrats and worshiping a glorious past--is equally silent. Instead of going to the U.N. and seeking a resolution declaring the Sunni terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his ilk war criminals, it sends Karen Hughes around the Arab world to get flagellated by Sunni Muslim women for how awful we are. The Bush team calls that "public diplomacy." I call is losing a public relations war to mass murderers.

+ Time to release this one into the wild...